Annual Holocaust Lecture: Dr. Bradley Prager on "Signs of Life: Depicting the Warsaw Ghetto in A Film Unfinished"

The Jewish Studies program at Ithaca College is presenting a film and lecture on the Holocaust. On Thursday, November 8, in Textor 101, at 7 pm, we will be screening Yael Hersonski’s film, A Film Unfinished.

On Monday, November 12, in Textor 102, at 7:30 pm, Dr. Bradley Prager will give the annual Holocaust lecture about this film. The title of his talk is “Signs of Life: Depicting the Warsaw Ghetto in A Film Unfinished.” Both events are free and open to the public.

A Film Unfinished, released last year, is about a Nazi propaganda film that was shot in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. The Nazi film was never shown during the Third Reich, but was used afterwards in documentary films about the Holocaust, because it was viewed as giving direct access to the experience of Jews in the Ghetto. In 1998, outtakes from the film were discovered which show how the scenes were staged and that they do not, in fact, document Jewish life in an unmediated fashion. Dr. Prager’s talk will focus on this disjunction between the Nazi pseudo-documentary and the way that it was subsequently used in later documentary films, and will raise questions about using Holocaust images in an unquestioning way. He will also speak to the students in “The Holocaust,” a course in the Politics department which is being taught this semester, and will have dinner with invited guests before his talk.

Brad Prager is Associate Professor of German and member of the program in Film Studies at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. His areas of research include Film History and Contemporary German Cinema, Holocaust Studies, and the art and literature of German Romanticism. He is the co-editor of Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (Camden House, 2008) and is currently completing a book on Holocaust documentaries

Dr. Prager’s lecture is sponsored by the Jewish Studies program at Ithaca College, and is generously supported by the Golberstein Jewish Studies Program fund.

The film and talk are free and open to the public.

For more information, please contact Rebecca Lesses, Coordinator of the Jewish Studies program, at (607) 274-3556 or rlesses@ithaca.edu.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Kim Wojtanik in the H&S Dean’s Office at 274-3102 or kwojtanik@ithaca.edu. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.